Making Films: Essential Sound Equipment

Making sure you have all of the critical pieces of equipment that you need to create a feature film can be very complicated. Ensuring that everything works together to create the perfect film that you are envisioning is never easy, but taking the time to ensure that everything is proper before you start recording your film is very important. Without good sound, you are likely to lose a large number of people who would make up your potential audience. This can often cause a great film to wind up largely ignored and a filmmaker extremely frustrated.

Your first piece of equipment is going to be a microphone. This is something that should be looked at far in advance of actually shooting any of the scenes so that you can be certain you are getting the best sound possible. Each microphone will have a different range that it works best. Your key to having good sound from each is knowing the proper range for the microphone that you are using. If you need a microphone that records close up, then you need to ensure you have proper placement, without getting so close that you are interrupting the filming of the scene. A microphone dropping into the scene during recording can ruin footage and create additional headaches in the future.

Microphone cables will be your second critical component. This needs to be properly installed or you will find that after spending a day shooting a scene that you love, you have no sound to work with. Nothing is worse than finding out you have wasted an entire day filming because the microphone cables were not properly connected. A period check is essential to ensure that they are connected. Aside from just ensuring the cables are connected, you need to ensure you pick up cables that are a good quality. Poor quality cables can cause problems when you are trying to record the sound and can add interference into the recording. Being very careful to avoid interference as well as ensure proper connection will go a long way towards ensuring that sound is properly recorded.

A final step is looking at the sound software that you have. Using good quality sound editing software you can make huge changes to the recording because you will have the flexibility to easily change the order of speech and sounds. You can also work to adjust the sound levels for a scene to adjust for ambient noises as well. You might discover that while you were recording there was an annoying siren in the background that is distracting from the scene, having additional ambient sound footage you would be able to replace the siren, which can help you to save the footage entirely.

As you can see, each of these three components is necessary to create the overall feeling for a movie. A feature film that has poor sound will likely lose the attention of the audience very quickly. Taking the time to really pull together the proper sound equipment is a great step towards ensuring the success of your movie. Taking pride in the sound will show as people are viewing your movie, and gives you a great opportunity to play with different sound scenarios to discover what really works best for the individual feature film that you are creating. Knowing how to make the changes and produce the quality results will be a key benefit that will serve you well for all feature films you create.

Making Films

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Essential Sound Equipment

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